2003-10-20 - 12:21 p.m.

Everything is Turning Blue

Right now, the tragedy -- if a word intended for dramatic theatrical productions about those of noble birth who are brought low by flaws in their own character really applies to real life in any productive sense -- seems to me not to be how flawed and broken we all are.

And make no mistake, those specimens of We that I have met and had the opportunity to take a close look at -- to touch and smell and feel and listen to -- are broken, unavoidably and definitively. Broken in the sense of limbs, sharp ends grinding against themselves and causing further damage. Broken in the sense of fighting against ourselves, jammed pistons and slow-meltdown misaligned gears skipping and wasting energy. We are not altogether for what we wish we were for.

Broken.

It doesn't make much sense to call something that everyone has problems with a tragedy -- it's a kind of community when you look at it that way, and only a bad thing when you're pulsing with the need to believe that it's not true and that your ideal Perfect Person is waiting just around the corner to tell you that you are, in fact, perfect too. Validation's only meaningful if you've a comparatively high opinion of the other person's opinion.

Comparatively because if you've got a hideously low opinion of everyone and only a moderately low opinion of this one person, that one person's opinion still counts for more than the others usually. Unless that person is a fish, in which case you've usually got their good opinion just by remembering to feed them, change their water, and clean the marbles and the little diver-man and bubbly treasure-chest at the bottom of the tank. Fish know who keeps them from getting gill-rot, goddammit, and they had better fucking worship us for it. Damn straight, preach it brother icthyoid.

Yeah, anyway. Moving back.

It's not that everyone's broken that seems so tragic, but that we break in such predictable, catagorizeable, analyzable, repetitive ways.

We break like our friends do, because we've spent so long with them that their viewpoints make a lot of sense -- and in sharing their perspectives, we share the weaknesses of any such mental specialization. The blind spots, the oversights in our psyches that never quite get fully cleaned and slowly mildew and fester and eventually burst out in some sort of unpleasant goo. You know what I mean if you've ever found them in yourself, but you may also be aware that you can never get them all clean.

Honestly, what would our personalities be like without the goo? What would our bodies be without all the messy stuff?

We tell stores and myths and legends about things that have no goo in them -- dragons, who definitely bleed and whatnot when you manage to kill them, but their easily identifiable essenses -- core of fire (symbol of cleansing in most cultures and mindsets even today when it's simultaneously seen as a rampant destructive force -- the great Randomizer), sheath of scales. Fundamentally inhuman both by reason of what's inside and out.

We, you see, are not covered in scales. We are not shiny -- not unless there's something really wrong with us. Our insides do not belch out great gouts of fire or plasma or cold or death or anything else. We just belch.

What we are without goo is just skeletons of what we could be. And just skeletons, to finish off the beaten-to-death metaphor that I am now going to let drop.

Our flaws rock us and drag us and imbalance us, and we end up far from the basic goals we have in common with those around us -- peace, prosperity, love, warm socks, fulfillment, a dishwasher that runs quietly and puts everything away when it's done, effiicent and nutritious dinners where everything tastes even better than it looks.

I bet we didn't find the recipes for those dinners by making the things we were shooting for, though. No philosopher yet has found anything of value by sorting through only what we do right -- well, exception granted for Socrates (father, naturally, of the Socratic method of truth-seeking, wherein you begin with the fundamental belief that the answers to the questions being asked are already within the grasping-range of the questioner and that all they need is small nudges [in the form of more, particularly phrased questions] to find the truth that already exists in themselves). I do tend to believe that a properly phrased question holds within itself the seed of it's own answer.

We break in historical ways -- people before us have already been through our breaks, written about them, and drawn from them what they were able. We don't care enough to find out who they were, learn what they learned, and build on it as we already do in the scientific world.

This is turning into a predictable diatribe on the inequitable progress in social and scientific fields, so I am going to shut up and go back to my video games for this, my day off.

I had forgotten in the past few months how much I enjoy writing here. I am going to try to do it somewhat more consistantly.

If you have not heard the new Perfect Circle album, it is well worth the time of anyone who enjoys good music. There is a mix of both harder and softer tunes than the original Mer de Noms, and all of them are very well done with excellent depth and a lot of thought put into them. If you're just looking for something to bang your head to, the new Static-X isn't too bad either, though the depth and variety aren't what I'd come to expect -- oh well, like I said, it's not bad.

Toodles.

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